Suspects’ Chechen Roots Draws Eyes In Russia

April 20, 2013

So far, official reaction to the story in Russia has been muted.

State-run news media show clips of President Vladimir Putin condemning the bombing and offering condolences to the people of Boston. State media also focus on the follow-up telephone call between Putin and President Obama

That’s a significant point, given that relations between Russia and the United States have been at a low point recently as the two nations exchange accusations of human rights abuses.

There’s been relatively little attention so far to the story that in 2011, the FBI investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers accused in the bombing.

That investigation came at the request of an unidentified foreign government. It could well have been Russia, which has reason to fear terrorist attacks after a long history of turmoil in the North Caucasus.

The Tsarnaev family are ethnic Chechens, with roots in the mountainous part of southern Russia between the Black and Caspian Seas, but the Tsarnaevs apparently spent little time in the region; a point that was driven home forcefully by Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.

“We do not know such people,” Kadyrov said, speaking of the Tsarnaevs. “They did not live in Chechnya.”

Kadyrov goes on to say the Tsarnaev brothers grew up in America, and therefore their actions reflect their American upbringing rather than a Chechen one.

Kadyrov is known for flamboyant rhetoric, but he appears to be right in saying that the Tsarnaevs have had little connection to Chechnya, or even to the region.

The brothers were reportedly born in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, where the family had lived for decades. The father, Anzor Tsarnaev, apparently tried to bring the family back to Chechnya around 1994, but that was the start of the first Chechen War.

There are records that the brothers went to school for about a year in neighboring Dagestan, before the family emigrated to the United States.

Anzor Tsarnaev has been giving interviews to Russian and foreign media from Makhachkala, the Dagestani capital. His wife, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told Russia’s RT channel that her sons had no ties to extremist groups.

“I am … a hundred percent sure that this is a setup,” she said. “My two sons are really innocent,”

Russian media say the parents have stopped giving interviews, and that they are no longer at the address in Dagestan where they had been staying.

Anzor Tsarnaev told interviewers that he had returned to the region because he was ill and believed he was dying.

Although he apparently spent more time in the United States than he had in the Caucasus, the father of the two bombing suspects seems to be saying that he preferred to die in the place where his family had its ethnic identity.

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